Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  The general store hadn’t changed. It was a barn of a place, drafty, with high ceilings and creaking floors, built out onto the pier. Nearby was the dock where we used to tie our boat up to buy gas and supplies before setting out for the island, and opposite that a jetty where the lobstermen kept their skiffs. What had disappeared was the diner and fish fry next door, replaced by a pricier restaurant advertising “the Real Maine Experience,” closed till spring.

  I got us coffee and doughnuts and suggested we eat them at the counter. The longer we were out, the better. When we finished I convinced him to walk with me past the harbor to the other end of the village, and from there we went out the lane to the point, with its war memorial and the plaque to fishermen lost at sea. On the unprotected side of this spit of land the tide had washed the snow off the rocks, leaving visible clumps of gray-green seaweed.

  Standing in the wind, looking out across the frigid water, I thought, This is absurd, our being up here alone in the cold. It’s romantic nonsense. I’m probably about to lose my job. I need to be back in the city, hustling. And if I’m unemployed, how long will it take before I lose the apartment? Then what? Force a move with Seth before it’s right? What good would all this be if it left me that far in a hole?

  “We had a picnic here,” Michael said. “Do you remember? Kelsey killed a lamed seagull. She finished it off. Strange. This is the first place up here I even recognize.”

  “She killed a seagull?”

  “Well, Dad wrung its neck when she was through with it, but I think it was fairly dead. Celia objected on procedural grounds—that we hadn’t taken it to a vet. It was definitely right here. It’s vivid as all get-out, actually. Like it was a minute ago. I can almost hear it. Maybe this is what it’s like taking hallucinogens.”

  “No, that’s different.”

  “You’ve taken them?”

  “In high school.”

  He nodded slowly, as if to say, That makes sense, though it still seemed to surprise him. That he had been oblivious to this episode in my social life.

  “I guess we didn’t talk much then, while I was away.”

  He said it as if it had never occurred to him before. It was a simple enough statement, an obvious fact, and yet I found myself, without warning, close to tears. I’d always wanted to hear from him. To know what he was doing in London, or just to hear him talk. But whenever he called it was to speak to Mom or Dad about school or money, and we didn’t say more than hello. He sent cassettes in the mail a few times, but the only words that came with them were the track listings and Post-it notes warning This will slay you! or Beware!

  “You liked it there, didn’t you?” I said, as we crossed back over the empty parking lot toward the village.

  “I did. I fell in love with a woman named Angie. That was the beginning. It’s odd, but when I say that, I can smell the perfume she wore. I can smell it in my head.”

  I smiled to myself. When had I ever taken a stroll with Michael and heard him reminisce? The veil between himself and the past was lifting.

  At half his usual dose his sleep got worse. By the end of our third week he couldn’t concentrate long enough to make it past the first few scenes of a movie, or even to pick out a DVD in the first place. He became fixated on the sound of the guy across the street chopping wood, asking me every few minutes, “Why does he go so slowly?”

  But the bursts of memory kept coming. He had always said he had difficulty picturing our father, or much of his childhood at all. But now, along with his monologues about how he couldn’t go through with our plan, how he would never be able to do his real work again, how he had failed and had no prospects, there were these fragments of the years gone by, which descended out of nowhere. They were questions, mostly.

  “Mom and Dad never drank much, did they?” he asked, as if suddenly recalling a detail of an otherwise elusive dream.

  They were just single moments at first. He asked if it was true that I had broken my arm falling out of a tree in the garden in Oxfordshire, and I said, Of course, amazed each time that he could have forgotten such familiar stories.

  “And I drove with you and Dad to the doctor, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the octagonal house—Dad, he told us stories.”

  “Yes” was all I could think to keep saying.

  By the time I had lowered him to a quarter ration, his body began to ache. His muscles were seizing up from the loss of the drug’s relaxant effects. I bought him Tylenol and a heating pad at the drugstore. And when he had a particular spot that was killing him, I kneaded his back with my knuckles through his hoodie, which he kept on no matter how far I turned up the heat.

  I was working a kink in his shoulder blade as he stood braced against the frame of the kitchen door when he said, “You let the snake into my room, didn’t you?”

  I stopped rubbing. This wasn’t just his voice returning. He was going all the way back now. As if he were a teenager again, talking to his younger sibling. The immediacy of the tone, the urgency of the question, as if it had happened only minutes ago, took me right back there with him, outside the door of his bedroom in Samoset, there on the landing.

  “That night the snake got into my room, you let it out, didn’t you?”

  He had lavished so much of his attention on that creature. I had been forbidden by our mother to touch it. No matter how many times I asked. I was too young, she said. Michael would sit with it on the back steps, wearing one of Mom’s tennis visors and a pair of her giant sunglasses, the snake coiled on the cutting board on his lap. “It’s basking,” he would say, “as we all deserve to bask.” Kelsey would stand vigil with me, intent on the serpent creature, its scales glistening like polished tiles, its forked tongue darting out to test the air, its lidless black eyes milky calm.

  “It was after we went to the landing with Dad,” Michael said now. “After you jumped in the mud.”

  That day, the one he meant, I had asked on our way home from church if we could take the Sunfish out on the bay, but everyone in the car had claimed it was too cold and too late in the year. Except Dad, who said, “Why not?”

  “Then take Michael with you,” my mother said.

  But Dad didn’t check the tide schedule before we left, and when we got to the landing the boats lay tilted on their sides across the mudflats. It had always looked like ordinary mud to me, but we’d been told it was dangerous, a deep silt that a man had drowned in once. We stood directly over it, at the end of the stranded jetty. Dad was already drifting off, beginning to think about other things. If we went home, he would read the paper, there would be Sunday lunch, and then he would nap and I would see no more of him.

  I don’t remember thinking about it much. I just stepped off the edge, threw my arms up, and called out to him. He swung around in an instant and leaned down to catch my hand just as the slime reached my neck, saving me with a sudden strength.

  When we got home, Michael wouldn’t stop saying that I had done it on purpose, that it wasn’t an accident.

  And Michael’s memory was correct. It was that night I waited until everyone’s light was out, then snuck down the back stairs into the playroom and let the snake rush into the mesh bag Michael used to transport it. I carried it up and unleashed it through the crack of his door, watching it slither toward his bed.

  “Why did you do it?” Michael asked now. “You little wheezer.”

  I nearly punched him in the neck right then, to punish him at last for all his mockery of me. But the urge broke almost at once into sadness, a sense of the utter goneness of that time. And then that, too, faded, leaving in its wake a wholly unfamiliar gratitude. For the fact that he had been my brother, and had let me hate him. For the fact that the five of us had been a family at all. And that Michael himself wasn’t gone. He was coming back now, here with me, piece by piece.

  As the drug left his system entirely, he began to hear things. He would come into the kitchen and put his ear to the speaker of the radio, b
ewildered to discover that it was turned off. He heard drums and synthesizers, he said, and the lyrics of entire songs. They went on for minutes at a time.

  I found him in the living room examining the Mitchells’ stereo, and later watched him listening at the window for a singing he heard coming from outdoors. I told him not to worry, that it was just a phase, his mind readjusting.

  Then came the sound of buses, and doors closing somewhere in the house, and loud static. He stopped sleeping altogether. I kept expecting him to rest on the couch during the day, but his pacing became more relentless. He begged off going to the gym, saying he was too fatigued, and I couldn’t contradict him.

  There was no elegant way to do this. He was going to suffer.

  He stayed in the living room mostly, and I stayed with him. I brought him food that he wolfed the first few bites of, as if starved, only to leave the rest untouched. More than panic, he seemed in the grip of fever. He begged me to give him back the pills. What point could there be in telling him that I had already thrown the rest away? It would only make him more frightened still.

  I kept forcing him to take walks in the mornings, and again in the late afternoons, when the agitation was at its worst. I convinced him a few times to take off his hoodie and lie facedown on the couch, and for half an hour or more I rubbed his back and neck, telling him over and over to breathe. After a while his shoulder blades would unclench and his head would sink deeper into the cushion, and I’d think that he might at least doze off from exhaustion. But as soon as I stopped, he got up and paced again, asking if I heard what he heard, driven from room to room by something close to delirium.

  It seemed as if whatever anxiety the drug had kept in check over the years had been stored up rather than eliminated, pooling like a dammed river in his head, and now the gates were open and the flood had arrived. There was nothing to do but wait for it to run its course. Eventually, his body had to tire.

  By this time the rest of the world seemed distant. I had phoned Seth only once since our last conversation, and I’d done it in the middle of his workday, when I knew he wasn’t likely to pick up, leaving a message rather than fully accounting for myself. I’d begun to let Celia’s calls go to the answering machine, and my mother’s as well. But then one evening Celia tried the cabin number again and again until I picked up.

  “You promised,” she said. “You said you’d stay in touch. Mom’s been calling me every day.”

  I’d stopped giving them updates because I knew what would happen. Michael would tell them he couldn’t keep going, and not being here to understand the progress we had made, they would decide to call a halt to it. Celia would shut it down.

  “There’s not a lot to report,” I said. “It’s hard. We didn’t expect it to be easy, right? But you should hear his voice. You wouldn’t believe it. He sounds ten years younger. He sounds alive.”

  When she asked to talk with him I could have made an excuse. That he was in the shower, or finally getting some sleep. We had come this far. What good could there be in going backward, in losing the ground he’d suffered to gain? But I hadn’t slept much myself in the last few days, listening for him in the night, worrying as soon as I closed my eyes that the whole effort had been a mistake. At least if he spoke to Celia, the decision to keep going wouldn’t be mine alone.

  I went into the living room and handed Michael the phone, thinking, This is it, we tried.

  He heard Celia out on whatever she had to say for a minute or two, then replied, “I just need to sleep. That’s the thing. It’s brutal, not sleeping. But Alec’s here. He’s trying to help me.” Again he listened, and again he deflected her. “You shouldn’t worry anymore,” he said. “Any of you.”

  He could have ended it right then by complaining enough to her that she would command me to stop. But he didn’t. He chose not to.

  “He sounds like a wreck,” she said, once Michael had handed the phone back.

  “He’s started remembering,” I replied, going upstairs, out of earshot. “You always said that’s what he needed to do, isn’t it?”

  “Alec, you’re not going to solve his life for him in a month. This has to be the beginning.”

  “I know. That’s what it is. But I have to see it through. Will you call Mom for me? Just tell her it’s okay, please.”

  It snowed again the next morning, blanketing the road and the car and our footprints on the path. When the sky cleared and the sun came out, I told Michael we were going to walk in the opposite direction this time, away from the village.

  There were only three more houses beyond the Mitchells’ along this stretch, all closed for winter, their driveways blocked by the snowbanks the plow had left behind, their yards smooth white planes sloping toward the water. We followed the road into the woods, where the sunlight barely penetrated and the quiet was nearly complete. Michael hadn’t been out of the house in two days, since he’d stopped sleeping altogether, and he seemed discombobulated by his surroundings. He neither lagged behind me nor sped ahead. Finally, his vigilance had ebbed, his attention growing softer. More than anything else, he seemed to be trying to find his bearings.

  After a half mile or so, the road climbed into a rocky field that overlooked the bottom of the inlet. From here we could see across the open water to the island, a mound of dark green ringed by snow-covered boulders and a strip of granite at the waterline.

  “That’s the house,” I said. “On the bluff.” I had remembered the island as being much farther out, in a great expanse of sea, but in truth the distance was only a mile or two. “Do you see it?”

  Michael squinted. “Where is it?” he said.

  I pointed, guiding his head. His eyes were puffy, and practically drooping shut, even out here in the cold. He’ll sleep now, I thought. I’ll give him food and hot tea, and he’ll sleep.

  But he didn’t. Not that night, and not the next, and not the night after that. On his sixth sleepless night I got up in the small hours of the morning to take a piss, and as I padded toward the bathroom, I heard the back door open downstairs, and then footsteps on the kitchen floor.

  “Michael?” I called.

  The footsteps stopped.

  “Yeah?” he said, after a moment.

  “What are you doing?”

  When he gave no response, I turned on the hall light and went down.

  He had taken a seat in the dark at the dining room table. I switched on the lamp on the sideboard and saw in front of him a juice glass and a bottle of Scotch.

  “There’s a song,” he said. “It won’t stop.”

  He tore the seal, uncorked the bottle, and, using both hands to steady it, poured himself a drink.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “You put it in the shed.”

  “But we agreed. You asked me to get rid of it.”

  He lifted the glass to his lips and took a large swallow. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said. “You should go back to bed.”

  I put on a sweatshirt that I’d left on one of the dining chairs, and sat at the table opposite him. Had he watched me take the box of booze outside? Or had he just figured I was too much of a skinflint to throw it away? It didn’t matter now. One drink wouldn’t hurt him.

  We sat for a minute or two as he finished what he’d poured.

  “Do you know?” he said. “I haven’t had sex in six years. Six years ago—and that was just twice, with Bethany. Before that it was two years. Twice in eight years. I started writing pornography. Back in Michigan. Just for myself. So at least there would be something besides the Internet.”

  I didn’t need to know this, I didn’t want to know it. But I had said that I would listen, and so I did.

  “It helped, actually,” he said. “Making it personal like that. It was surprisingly effective. Just the writing of it.”

  “That makes sense. I guess.”

  “The good thing about some of the drugs—they amputated my libido. Which made it easier. It was a blessing, it really was.�
��

  “You said there was a song in your head, what song?”

  “‘Temptation,’ New Order. Just one line on a loop: Up, down, turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground / Tonight I think I’ll walk alone, I’ll find my soul as I go home. Their lyrics were never great. But that melody played on the bass line…”

  “It’s not going to keep going like this,” I said. “It can’t go on like this forever.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Because you’re off it now. All of it. This is the trailing stuff. You’ve done it.”

  He rested his forearms on the table and leaned forward, lowering his head. “There’s a limit, Alec. You don’t want to think about it, but there’s an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can’t just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That’s a fairy tale. It’s what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It’s just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you. Dad, for instance. I never blamed him. I never did. He reached his limit.”

  “You’re hearing music, Michael. It’s going to pass. I can put on other music. We should have been doing that, we should have been listening to more music together.”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “I understand now why they deny people sleep to torture them. That’s what it is—torture.”

  “You’ve had a drink. It’ll take the edge off. You should lie down and close your eyes. The exhaustion’s going to catch up with you.”

  He seemed to be laboring for each breath, his lungs trying to stretch the skin tightened over his chest. Again using both hands to steady the bottle, he filled the glass three-quarters full.

  “That’s not a good idea,” I said.

  He gazed at the plastic juice glass with its checkered print. “I shouldn’t have gone back to England,” he said. “I should never have left you all there in that house. Not that I could have stopped him. But I could have warned you. I could have been there.”